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Ward Churchill Redux

By Stanley Fish April 5, 2009 10:00 pmApril 5, 2009 10:00 pm

Last Thursday, a jury in Denver ruled that the termination of activist-teacher Ward Churchill by the University of Colorado had been wrongful (a term of art) even though a committee of his faculty peers had found him guilty of a variety of sins.

The verdict did not surprise me because I had read the committee’s report and found it less an indictment of Churchill than an example of a perfectly ordinary squabble about research methods and the handling of evidence. The accusations that fill its pages are the kind scholars regularly hurl at their polemical opponents. It’s part of the game. But in most cases, after you’ve trashed the guy’s work in a book or a review, you don’t get to fire him. Which is good, because if the standards for dismissal adopted by the Churchill committee were generally in force, hardly any of us professors would have jobs.

At least two reviewers of my 2001 book “How Milton Works” declared that my reading of “Paradise Lost” rests on an unproven assumption that Milton repeatedly and designedly punned on the homonyms “raised” (elevated), “razed” (destroyed) and “rased” (erased). I was accused of having fabricated these puns out of thin air and of building on the fabrication an interpretive house of cards that fell apart at the slightest touch of rationality and evidence.

I use the criticism of my own work as an example because to talk about the many others who have been accused of incompetence, ignorance, falsification, plagiarism and worse would be bad form. And it wouldn’t prove anything much except that when academics assess one another they routinely say things like, “Professor A obviously has not read the primary sources”; “Professor B draws conclusions the evidence does not support”; “Professor C engages in fanciful speculations and then pretends to build a solid case; he’s just making it up”; “Professor D does not acknowledge that he stole his argument from Professor E who was his teacher (or his student).”

The scholars who are the objects of these strictures do not seem to suffer much on account of them, in part because they can almost always point to positive reviews on the other side, in part because harsh and even scabrous judgments are understood to be more or less par for the course. And I won’t even go into the roster of big-time historians who in recent years have been charged with (and in some instances confessed to) plagiarism, distortion and downright lying. With the exception of one, these academic malfeasants are still plying their trades, receiving awards and even pontificating on television.

Why, given these examples of crimes or errors apparently forgiven, did Ward Churchill lose his job (he may now regain it) when all he was accused of was playing fast and loose with the facts, fudging his sources and going from A to D in his arguments without bothering to stop at B and C? In short, standard stuff.

The answer Churchill’s partisans would give (and in the end it may be the right answer) is “politics.” After all, they say, there wouldn’t have been any special investigative committee poring over Churchill’s 12 single-author books, many edited collections and 100-plus articles had he not published an Internet essay on Sept. 12, 2001, saying that the attacks on the World Trade towers and the Pentagon were instances of “the chickens coming home to roost” and that those who worked and died in the towers were willing agents of the United States’ “global empire” and its malign policies and could therefore be thought of as “little Eichmanns.”

These incendiary remarks were not widely broadcast until four years later, when Bill O’Reilly and other conservative commentators brought them to the public’s attention. The reaction was immediate. Bill Owens, governor of Colorado, called university president Elizabeth Hoffman and ordered her to fire Churchill. She replied, “You know I can’t do that.” (Not long after, she was forced to resign.)

The reason she couldn’t do it is simple. A public employee cannot be fired for extramural speech of which the government (in this case Gov. Owens) disapproves. It’s unconstitutional. A public employee can be fired, however, for activities that indicate unfitness for the position he or she holds; and after flirting with the idea of a buyout, the university, aware that questions had been raised about Churchill’s scholarship, appointed a committee to review and assess his work, no doubt in the hope that something appropriately damning would be found.

It was, or so the committee said. It found inaccuracies in Churchill’s account of the General Allotment Act of 1887, a piece of legislation generally considered to be a part of an extended effort to weaken the force of Native American culture. In his discussion of the act, Churchill described it as a “eugenics code” that uses the “Indian blood quantum requirement” to achieve its end. But there is no mention of any “blood quantum” requirement in the text. Indeed, the act “contained no definition of Indian whatsoever.”

But then, after having established what could possibly be classified as a misrepresentation, the committee turned back in Churchill’s direction, and allowed that while the blood quantum requirement was not “expressly” stated, there was some force to Churchill’s contention that it is “somehow implied.” “In this respect,” the committee continued, there “is more truth to part of Professor Churchill’s claim” than his critics are “prepared to credit.”

Still Churchill, the committee went on to say, was factually wrong when he says of the Act that it introduced “for the first time” the “federal imposition of racial Indian ancestry” as a device designed to force assimilation. That happened, the committee reported, 40 years earlier. So that while Churchill gets “the general point correct,” he “gets the historical details wrong.” Moreover, when his errors were pointed out by another researcher in the field, Churchill simply ceased making the erroneous claims and “offered no public retraction or correction.” The conclusion? “Professor Churchill deliberately embellished his broad, and otherwise accurate or, at least reasonable, historic claims regarding the Allotment Act of 1887 with details for which he offered no reliable independent support.”

That’s it? He didn’t verify some details and he didn’t denounce himself? There must be something else and there is. Churchill, the committee noted, argues that the U.S. army, among others, “intentionally introduced the smallpox virus to Native American tribes,” and he claims also that circumstantial evidence implicates John Smith (of Pocahontas fame) in this outrage.

The committee found that with respect to Smith, Churchill “did not connect the dots in his proposed set of circumstantial evidence.” As for the allegation that that the army spread smallpox by knowingly distributing infected blankets, the committee found no support in written records, but notes that Native American oral traditions rehearse and pass down this story, which has at least one documented source in British General Jeffrey Amherst’s suggestion in 1763 that infected blankets be given to hostile Indians.

The conclusion? “We do not find academic misconduct with respect to his general claim that the U.S. Army deliberately spread smallpox.” In addition, the committee acknowledges that “early accounts of what was said by Indians involved in that situation and certain native oral traditions provide some basis for [Churchill’s] interpretation.”

In short, it seems for an instant that Churchill is going to be declared (relatively) innocent of the most serious charges against him. But after noting that he cited sources that do not support his argument and failed to document his assertion that up to 400,000 Indians died in the smallpox epidemic, the committee turned severe and declared, “We therefore find by a preponderance of the evidence a pattern of deliberate academic misconduct involving falsification, fabrication, and serious deviation from accepted practices.” On the evidence of its own account the committee does not seem to have earned its “therefore.”

The question of “accepted practices” is raised again in a particularly focused form when the committee considers the issue of Churchill’s “ghostwriting.” On several occasions Churchill wrote essays to which others put their names and then, at a later date, he cited those essays in support of an argument he was making. The committee decided that a charge of plagiarism could not be sustained since it is not plagiarism to cite ones own work (even if it bears another’s name). That does not dispose of the issue, however, because in the committee’s view “ghostwriting” is itself a “form of misconduct” that fails “to comply with established practices” and deceives readers into thinking that an author has independent authority for his assertions, when in reality the only authority he has is his own.

Churchill’s response came in two parts. First he pointed out that university regulations (Colorado’s or anyone else’s) do not contain guidelines relating to ghostwriting. There seems, therefore, to be no “established” practice for him to violate. Second, he challenged the assertion that a text he wrote cannot be properly cited as independent support for something he is writing in the present.

He argued (during the committee hearing and in Works and Days, 2009) that what ghostwriters do in the academy and elsewhere is give voice to the views and conclusions of others. All the ghostwriter does is supply the prose; the ideas and contentions belong to the third party, who, if she did not agree to “own” the sentiments, would decline to affix her name to them. Thus when the ghostwriter subsequently cites to the text of which he has been merely the midwife, he is citing not to himself but to the person to whose ideas he gave expression. “It follows that ghostwriters are under no obligation . . . to attribute authorship to themselves when quoting/citing material they’ve ghostwritten.”

Well, that’s a little tricky, but it is an argument, and one that committee members, no doubt, would have a response to. But all that means is that there would be another round of the academic back-and-forth one finds in innumerable, books, essays, symposiums, panel discussions — all of which are routinely marked by accusations of shoddy practices and distortions of evidence, but none of which is marked by the demand that the person on the other side of the question from you be fired and drummed out of the academy.

There is, as I think I’ve shown, a disconnect in the report between its often nuanced considerations of the questions raised in and by Churchill’s work, and the conclusion, announced in a parody of a judicial verdict, that he has committed crimes worthy of dismissal, if not of flogging. It is almost as if the committee members were going along happily doing what they usually do in their academic work — considering , parsing and evaluating arguments — and then suddenly remembering that they were there for another purpose to which they hastily turn. Oh, yes, we’re supposed to judge him; let’s say he’s guilty.

I can easily imagine the entire affair being made into a teaching aid — a casebook containing Churchill’s “little Eichmanns” essay, the responses to it by politicians, columnists and fellow academics, assessments of Churchill’s other writings by friends and foes, the investigative committee’s report, responses to the report (one group of academics led by Eric Cheyfitz, a chaired professor at Cornell, has formally charged the committee itself with research misconduct), the trial record, the verdict, reactions to the verdict, etc.

You could teach a whole course — probably more than one — from such a compilation and one of the questions raised in such a course would be the question I have been asking: How did a garden-variety academic quarrel about sources,evidence and documentation complete with a lot of huffing and puffing by everyone get elevated first into a review of the entire life of a tenured academic and then into a court case when that academic was terminated. How and why did it get that far?

I said earlier that the answer Churchill partisans would give is “politics.” It is also the answer the jury gave. It was the jury’s task to determine whether Churchill’s dismissal would have occurred independently of the adverse political response to his constitutionally protected statements. In the ordinary academic course of things would his writings have been subject to the extended and minute scrutiny that led to the committee’s recommendations? Had the governor not called Hoffman, had state representatives not appeared on TV to call for Churchill’s head, had commentators all over the country not vilified Churchill for his 9/11 views, would any of this have happened.? The answer seems obvious to me and it has now been given authoritative form in the jury’s verdict.

Let me add (I hope it would be unnecessary) that nothing I have said should be taken either as a judgment (positive or negative) on Churchill’s work or as a questioning of the committee’s motives. I am not competent to judge Churchill’s writings and I express no view of them. And I have no doubts at all about the integrity of the committee members. They just got caught up in a circus that should have never come to town.

As John Adams said, “Facts are stubborn things.” The fact is that Ward Churchill was on the wrong side of the 9/11 tragedy and probably still is, Dr. Fish. I hate to say it, but he should’ve kept his mouth shut.

How can you “have no doubts at all about the integrity of the committee members”? I’m not saying for sure that they compromised their integrity here. But I do have doubts. After all, as you yourself argue, they found evidence for only minor transgressions and then claimed that this evidence constituted a dastardly pattern of malfeasance. Is it a mere coincidence that their conclusion just so happened to line up with what the Governor and others expected of them? Maybe so, maybe not. But surely there’s a little doubt.

Churchill and others like Bill Maher found out the hard way that Americans are not fond of blaming the victims of September 11th for their own deaths. It is a case where they had a point on some level but failed to exercise the proper self-restraint and self-editing required to keep their jobs and reputations.

To me, this is further evidence that researchers in the humanities may get away with murder (or at least serious research misconduct) by pointing out that everyone else does it too. This is why what they (or at least many of them) are doing cannot be properly be called science.

Good piece Mr. Fish. No doubt O’Reilly will now start vilifying you as a “pinhead.” Resist the temptation to respond. Just remember that O’Reilly has now been summed up for the ages by David Letterman:

Many academics use the cloak of anonymity provided by the “blind referee” process to make the type of garden variety academic attacks Professor Fish describes. Unlike authors, such referees have little to lose by letting loose their anonymous volleys which are more common than they should be. From the description of the report on Professor Churchill described here, it sounds like this is yet another such assault. Who is there to police the referees?

Ward Churchill claimed, but could not supply references or evidence that the army supplied blankets with smallpox to the Indians. I find your claim, “I am not competent to judge Churchill’s writings and I express no view of them.”, remarkable since any decent scholar can see Churchill’s error. Perhaps you should read one of Alan Sokal’s books on his hoax to educate yourself about evidence and thinking.

People who got upset about Ward Churchill have too little faith in democracy and freedom of speech. Freedom of speech is really competition of speech, and when money is removed from the equation (and it would be nice if this could happen more often) – fringe ideas that don’t hold water don’t tend to gain a foothold. Most people will ignore the assertion that the victims of 9/11 were “little Eichmanns” because it’s ridiculous and simplistic – many a learned person speaking publicly would have probably found a better way to approach whatever argument she was trying to make than Churchill did . It is beneath scholarship, but it is also something that is so bloviated that it is easily passed over as the ravings of a crank or somebody who lacks the subtlety of thought to say much of interest. At least if we focus on that little phrase and focus on that one particular subject.

Churchill might be better off when talking about subjects nearer and dearer to his studies.

Scholars should be more careful however, to mind the distortions that will be thrown at them by the anti-intellectuals who plague the US and whose attempts to reduce arguments to their barest and most inane details will simply create a dialogue about nothing. If you don’t want to talk about how US policy is a factor in terrorism, call innocent people Eichmanns and by all means, stray away from any part of your argument which might make sense and make people think. In the end, the crime Churchill is guilty is of is similar to the crimes I believe people like Bill O’Reilly and Glenn Beck are guilty of committing – that of distorting philosophical and political arguments to the point of abstract emotional reactions that have little bearing outside of the individual’s own experience in reacting to an event or idea. And as the government has no right to interfere in the ravings of O’Reilly or Beck, they also have no right to regulate the ravings of a professor. To say, well the state of Colorado employs him as a counter argument is to assign the government more power than I think most people would want to give it. Hopefully Churchill challenges his students with better material in the classroom than he did when he made that lecture that has been such a ridiculous but important sideshow in the academic community.

I expect Ward Churchill, or at least his heirs, will thank Bill O’Reilly for being the mean-spirited entertainer he is, Governor Bill Owens for being the crass, opportunistic politician he is, and the mob for being the self-righteous bunch of sheep it is. For how else would a relatively obscure college professor get elevated to the level of H.U.A.C., The Hollywood Ten, and Sen. Joe McCarthy?

America seems to need these periodic paroxysms as part of its ongoing effort to define its identity. It’s not easy being a relatively new country, a nation of relatively recent immigrants of differing religions, languages , and ethnicities, a nation primarily held together by its belief in and striving to follow a set of principles largely spelled out in a Declaration of Independence and a Constitution. When you’re not really sure who “we” are, it feels a lot more secure to be able to define a “them”, and then figure “we” are those who are not “them.”

When you read the commentary on the verdict, many people apparently still think that Professor Churchill deserves to have been fired for what he wrote on September 12, 2001. How can so many Americans not understand that it is fundamentally un-American for the State of Colorado to fire someone as retaliation for an opinion he expressed? Even the University of Colorado came to understand that they had no legal basis upon which to terminate the Professor for his opinions. (Which is why they concocted this catalog of supposed academic failings that Professor Fish so effectively dismisses, just as the jury did.)

This is a case that should never have gone to trial. A matter such as this should have been settled long ago. Because of the hot political spotlight, “cooler heads” were never able to prevail at the University of Colorado. The University left Professor Churchill in personal and professional limbo for 4½ years. The University wasted its resources in this matter, including time and money. Because the University of Colorado is a public institution, I assume that we will eventually get to see an accounting of what this episode cost the State of Colorado. They should be ashamed.

All which leads us to conclude that this uproar has been little more than much ado about nothing. Of course, suggesting that the 9/11 victims were serving something akin to a mad extermination of millions does seem both inaccurate and insensitive. Certainly, no one would suggest, in turn, that the former governor behaved like a little Hitler. Now, if this outspoken professor gets his job back, along with the dollar he was awarded by the jury, all’s well that ends well. Except of course for paying his attorney fees.

Churchill’s website contends that the CU investigation actually solicited charges of academic misconduct from his peers. I’ve not seen any corroboration of that claim, but if it is true, then that strikes me as misconduct on the part of the CU preliminary committee (one of whom was the Dean of the CU law school).

While we may like the result (Churchill’s effective firing by the university), we should caution ourselves about this sort of thing as precedent.

However obnoxious or even abhorrent a professor’s views may be, if they can be silenced as politically incorrect then the most powerful voices of dissent will waver and free speech will lose a powerful ally.

Hopefully Professor Stanley Fish will now go to the next stage and see that there are more important cases in education where politicians have used their influence to create far more damaging and unjust farces than the attempted firing of Ward Churchill.

Currently teachers in the public school system are the scapegoats of politicians for the damaged public education system of this nation.

Our public school system have millions of children for whom English is not their language.

Our public school system has for years had a separate and not equal system where the differences between public schools in affluent communities and public schools in poor communities are evident and significant..

Parents and children in public schools in poor communities are rightly concerned about personal safety, while parents and children in public schools in affluent communities are not.

And what is the solution of politicians to these problems.

Politicians claim that the cause is bad and lazy teachers. They claim that performance pay will motivate the lazy teachers to do their job and that bad teachers should be fired. They use special admission to voucher systems, and charter schools to appease the most vocal parents, knowing full well that vouchers and charter schools can not be used as a full replacement for the public school system.

And what has been the response of the professors of education who educate the public school teachers of America.

They do the bidding of the politicians and remain silent.

Apparently professors have standards to judge the intellectual work of others, but refuse to see obvious fallacies of the politicians regarding public education in this nation.

Hopefully Professor Stanley Fish now will move on to the circus of public education created by politicians in order to simply placate their constituents at the expense of teachers.

While it may be true Mr. Fish, that Mr. Churchill and the committee, “…just got caught up in a circus that should have never come to town,” the more important question I think everyone needs to ask is, “Who – which ringmasters – brought this particular type of circus to this specific community?”

As we can all plainly see by the evidence, the “circus” in question was brought to this community by Bill O’Reily and the rest of the far-right wing hate-merchants that regularly attempt (and fail) to pass themselves off as real journalists – as O’Reilly did just last week on the David Letterman show.

This episode with Mr. Churchill only further serves to prove their kind needs to be kindly escorted to the edge of the academic world, and forcefully shoved out until they can learn how the rules work within the environment of academia, higher education, and education in general.

There are some perfectly valid and legitimate conservative arguments within academia, on many different types of issues. But in order for those arguments to be heard fairly, this kind of attempted censorship of Mr. Churchill – or any Professor – must go through the process that is considered legitimate for academia.

The kind of “trial by media” that was attempted against Mr. Churchill appears that it may have now (thankfully) been brought to a halt by an actual trial, in our court system.

It’s now time, I feel, that the ringmasters themselves be brought to trial, and simply forced to choose: do you wish to involved yourself in the world of academics? Or do you wish to be involved in the world of entertainment?

Because while learning can (and should) be challenging, interesting, and vigorous – things academics usually find “fun”; and entertainment can, at times, be educational; the two disciplines operate on entirely different sets of rules. And these rules are quite often mutually exclusive.

If the “ringmasters” choose the realm of entertainment, then their products need to be branded as such, boldly and completely, so that there is no confusing their actions and claims of negative action – like the claims against Prof. Churchill – with the far more serious and valuable claims of real plagiarism and falsification from academics evaluating other academics’ work.

While we may not be able to so easily brand “news” and “entertainment”, and separate the two into “truth” and “lies”, we should far more easily be able to separate “circus” from “education”, and put a significant wedge between the two.

Unless you go to clown college, “a goon” should never be the ones calling the academic police in to recall your teaching license.

Everything about this essay was informative and useful–until the last two sentences.

If you take no position on the quality and integrity of Churchill’s research, why do you feel compelled to give the committee members your vote of confidence? What do you actually know about their individual “integrity”? I suspect, nothing.

Dr. Fish, in that last ‘disclaimer’ paragraph, you have inexplicably betrayed, rather than affirmed, your own principles. The actions of the committee, and the verdit of the jury speak for themselves.

When I was in the service, it was a common saying among my fellow servicemen and women that while I may disagree with what you say, I would defend with my life your right to say it. But then this was back in the relatively tranquil Reagan era. We hadn’t gotten to the vast right-wing conspiracy involving the Clinton’s yet and all that that led us to.

I also recall back in that better age, we as American’s used to distinguish ourselves from our global adversary (the Russians) by the ideals that my country stood for and theirs didn’t- freedom of religion, freedom of speech, freedom of the press, etc. The Russians may have had Pravda, but we had the truth, or so we thougt.

I think I knew that their system had actually won when I read about laws being enacted all over my country encouraging citizens to report on their neighbors and children to report on their parents for transgressions of the law, like maybe even smoking a joint!

When a Presidential press secretary ominously warns Americans that we all need to “be careful of what we say” and a Governor of a relatively unpopulated western state (of which I am a resident) tells a University President to fire a tenured professor for his political writings, when rabid right-wing reactionaries encourage armed insurrection and a significant segment of the populations starts arming themselves and killing the police, then I know that my country has all but died.

Ward Churchill is entitled to his opinions. He is entitled to express them as freely as any of us. If he isn’t, then who among us is? If he can be denied his livelihood for speaking and writing his mind, then what kind of freedom is that?

S Fish’s piece failed to mention that a significant and long-standing charge against Ward Churchill is that he has passed himself off as an American Indian. Indeed, his very hiring at Boulder was an “opportunity hire” for this Master Degreed individual (he later received an honorary doctorate from Alfred University and, during the trial, stated that he preferred to be addressed as “Doctor”).

In fact, no evidence can be found for his claims of native ancestry. He also describes himself as an “enrolled member of the United Keetoowah Band” – though they say that he is not, though he and many others had been given a card saying they were honorary members – he is not enrolled.

Why does Fish insist on brushing off this person’s behavior? Churchill, a tenured professor, has accomplished no original research and defended his citing of essays that he wrote but put someone else’s name on. When asked why he didn’t make himself a co-author on these essays, his answer was that he “didnt have to”.

Churchill is, at best, a lightweight and an embarrassment. His colleagues should be insulted that he was granted tenure without a PhD after only two years and has contributed no original scholarship and in a field in which he poses as a native.

Though he would defend the legacy and rights of persons of native ancestry he is, in fact, exploiting their plight for his own pervere satisfaction.

“It was the jury’s task to determine whether Churchill’s dismissal would have occurred independently of the adverse political response to his constitutionally protected statements.”

This strikes me as a strange standard for the jury, and one which virtually predetermines the verdict. Of course the fact that Bill O’Reilly singled this guy out let to the university’s investigation, which led to his dismissal. There was never any question of that.

The real question for me, though, is whether Churchill is a fraud. If Churchill is a charlatan but still cannot be fired, we are sending the message that frauds everywhere can protect themselves merely by being controversial. Unfortunately, I believe the academic world is moving in that direction.

Universities should always fire quacks, even if their quackery came to light through sensationalism.

What a relief! I thought that I would be subjected to a bunch of drivel about that other Churchill. Silly me, having forgotten all about the fiasco in CO. So, in the end, it was a point about drivel and not drivel at all (not that P. Fish ever really waists ones time). Still, the less one mentions Billy Boy’s name, in print or any other media, is the better part of valor, for me. Now what meaningless activity was I up to before….? bc

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Stanley Fish is a professor of humanities and law at Florida International University, in Miami. In the Fall of 2012, he will be Floersheimer Distinguished Visiting Professor at the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law. He has also taught at the University of California at Berkeley, Johns Hopkins, Duke University and the University of Illinois, Chicago. He is the author of 15 books, most recently “Versions of Antihumanism: Milton and Others”; “How to Write a Sentence”; “Save the World On Your Own Time”; and “The Fugitive in Flight,” a study of the 1960s TV drama. “Versions of Academic Freedom: From Professionalism to Revolution” will be published in 2014.